monday • jul 10, 2023 • 5:00 pm

What the Rain Sounds Like Now

Rain on a roof is a specific sound — a few hundred small percussive events a second, no two exactly alike, because no two drops fall from the same height at the same angle onto the same surface. My studio has a metal roof. I have loved that sound my whole life. I grew up in the desert of West Texas, where rain is a rumor most of the year, and you learn to read it coming before you see it, if you see it: the smell first — petrichor, which is really geosmin, a compound made by soil bacteria and released into the air the moment a raindrop hits ground dry enough to have been waiting for it — rolling across miles of caliche ahead of the storm itself, then the thunder, then the excitement of it, then the run outside. Bare feet on hot concrete, then wet grass, then the first fat drops. The air cools — finally. My kids had it too. That specific joy has a name in every generation of my family before this one.

On July 4, 2025, the water we love came up through the floors of homes along the Guadalupe and took people with it. Camp Mystic. Families asleep in the low ground. Somewhere, this summer, a child heard thunder wand felt the old excitement turn into something else. A body that has learned rain can kill is doing exactly what a body is supposed to do, paying attention. The problem was never the fear. The problem is what caused it, and what we're offering instead of an answer.

Roughly 90 percent of the planet's cooling happens through water — evaporation, transpiration, the endless small phase-changes of a system moving heat off itself the way it always has. Water is not the threat in that sentence. Water doing what water has always done, in a landscape built to receive it, cools us. Water doing what water has always done, in a landscape we paved and channelized and stripped of anything that could slow it down, drowns us. The flood is not water's betrayal. It's the bill for a century of decisions about where water was and wasn't allowed to go.

I wrote an earlier draft of this and used the word violent to describe how we've treated water — the concrete ditches, the straightened channels, the reservoirs that hold it wrong. An editing tool suggested harsh instead, gentler, and I took the suggestion. I want to take it back. We are, culturally, extremely practiced at softening the language around our treatment of water and land the same way we are teaching children to flinch at the sky.

A child's fear of rain will not be cured by reassurance. It will be cured by a landscape that has earned back the right to be trusted — soil with enough organic matter to drink the storm instead of shedding it, a creek allowed to spread into the ground beside it instead of racing straight for the next bayou, prairie doing the underground work it did for ten thousand years before we decided grass should be short and water should be somewhere else. Not sandbags. Not another warning system.

I want my children's children to smell it coming, raise their faces to the sky, and run outside when it starts. I want that instinct to be correct again.

Re-greening a Dryland Watershed: usgs.gov/media/videos/re-greening-dryland-watershed

To Soar

This is the drawing before the piece is a piece — hand and eye still deciding: water to wing to petal; a beak, a seed head, a cleft in a lily pad.

The edge of a feather blossoms and a blade of grass takes flight.

When I was asked to make a piece for the Nick Fennigan Counseling Center fall fundraiser, I said yes without hesitation. It’s an organization worth supporting — they counsel families affected by extreme weather, including many who lost family members in the flooding of July 4, 2025. Water and grief, water and generations, is ground I’ve been standing on for a while now. Their work matters to me on more levels than one.

So I don’t want this piece to merely decorate a hallway. I want it to hold what happens in that room — someone arriving low, in the mess of it, and finding, slowly, that they can rise. I want it to be a resource, an inspiration — something that lifts spirits the way lilies rise out of the mud every morning, the way sandhill cranes, once nearly gone themselves, still rise out of the wetlands and don’t look back at what they’re leaving.

So I drew a wetland, and I drew it the way I think about first responders — which is to say, not as uniforms and sirens, but as what shows up first when a system has been wounded and starts, quietly, insisting on repair. A weed pushing through cracked asphalt is a first responder. So is a bird.

Sandhill cranes are in this piece because their comeback is one of the real ones — a species that was down to a scattering of breeding pairs, that could have gone the way of so many others, and instead climbed back. Slowly. Generation by generation, without hurry, without announcement. That feels true to what happens in a counseling room too.

The birds are drawn mid-lift — wings still tangled in the reeds and in each other, not yet clear of the water. That’s the moment I wanted: not before the flight and not after it, but the part where you’re releasing the wetland and it is letting go too. I think that’s closer to what the center’s clients are actually doing than any image of a bird already high and settled in a clean sky would be.

And underneath all of it, water lilies — because they close every night and go back down into the dark water, and every morning they open again and rise, with the sun, the going-under makes them more beautiful. They don’t rise despite the muck. The muck is where the roots are. Where they seed. Even their blooms won’t hold still — female one day, male the next, never settling into the one story a flower is supposed to tell. I wanted that in the piece without saying it out loud.

The final work will be monotone — torn paper and dripping in whites lightly tinted, the same process I used for Unfolding Hope, scaled to eight feet by eight feet. But it starts here, in pencil, working out where every petal that becomes a feather needs to sit before any color touches the paper.

More as it develops.

The Scanning Eye

Tuesday, counselors from the Nick Fennigan Counseling Center came to my studio to talk about the piece I’m making for their auction. One of them mentioned, almost in passing, that she treats trauma with EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I knew its basic shape: the eyes move back and forth, left to right, while the patient holds a difficult memory in mind, and something about that motion helps the nervous system file it away as past instead of present. She’s spent years training to do this skillfully, with people in real pain. It works.

I went home. I walked through the gate, and before I’d registered doing it, my eyes were already moving across the pond — left, right — searching for a glimpse of the bullfrogs, hoping to catch one, checking the reeds for the night heron the lilies pads for the frogs. I do this in my gardens too, every time, without deciding to: scanning for new growth, for bees and butterflies, for whatever is crawling, climbing, or slithering through on its way somewhere else. I have never called it a technique. It is instinct — there was a day it was survival. Maybe it still is. I learned it from the pond, and the garden taught it to me again. I am sure I did it in the desert.

the pond.

Researchers looking for a mechanism behind EMDR’s eye movements identified the orienting response. In the 1990s, MacCulloch and Feldman proposed a Pavlovian-Darwinian account of it: an organism that couldn’t orient toward threat and opportunity in its environment didn’t survive to reproduce. The lateral, searching sweep of the eyes across living terrain is old behavioral software — older than language, older than any office a person might sit in to heal.

scanning for bullfrogs i spied the tiniest delightful being.

What the therapist is doing, I think, is more than administering a technique. She’s giving a nervous system access to a mode of perception it evolved for and hasn’t had steady work for in a long time — the same mode the pond and the garden still gift me. Before we managed our landscapes, every walk outside was scanning: where is danger, where is food, what just moved. Vigilance and wonder ran on the same current. The heron was a threat-check and a gift in the same glance.

Then came glass, mowed lawns, screens, art hung in a fixed row at eye height — interiors that ask nothing of the eye because nothing there can hurt or feed you. The old sweep didn’t disappear. It just ran out of terrain to practice on.

So maybe what the therapist restores in the room, the garden restores outside it. Not competing methods — the same reflex, given two different kinds of ground to work on. The bees and the bullfrogs aren’t incidental to what happens to me out there. They’re the terrain that makes the scanning necessary again.

The piece I’m making for the center’s auction will ask something similar of whoever stands in front of it. The lower part holds a strong side-to-side movement — the eye has to work there, back and forth, before anything resolves. Then the movement lifts up out of that messiness and soars. I built that in on purpose. I keep making the eye do the one thing it’s always known how to do.

Above is an image of the piece in progress for the auction. The pencil drawing is too light to see. I have printed the image and drawn over the marker lines to sit with the composition. I may erase the whole thing later.

More on this piece later.

I don’t have a tidy close for this one. Just this: I’m going to keep scanning the pond and the garden. And I’m aware how much luck is folded into having either — that for so many people, the only terrain left to scan is a room with a chair, and a hand moving side to side, because no pond or garden is theirs to practice on.

Further reading: The Role of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy in Medicine.

GLUTAMATE

say in Mandarin: do you have any bullfrogs for sale.

Every year they ask what I want for my birthday. It's July, always the same request, because summer is when the pond is at her best — the focal point of our lives and our home. We don't have a backyard. We have a cement pond on a patio, and everything else arranges itself around her.

Every year I ask for bullfrog tadpoles. And every year they're harder to find. When my kids were children, they caught them themselves — waded in, cupped their hands, brought me the future chorus. Now they have their own lives, their own children, and the time to find and catch a tadpole is a luxury for them.

This year my son Griffin called a Chinese grocery store. He asked, in English, if they had bullfrogs for sale. They spoke Mandarin, didn't understand him, and hung up. He called back. They hung up again. He tried a third time, same result.

Finally he asked ChatGPT to help. What it gave him back wasn't Mandarin — it was the instruction “say in Mandarin: do you have any bullfrogs for sale.” We both burst out laughing. Then his dog lost its footing and fell in the pond. He called the store again and held his phone up to mine so it could speak the instructions instead of the actual words — still not an answer. So he asked ChatGPT to actually teach him the words this time, not translate for him, but teach him — and he called back one more time and said it himself.

They had bullfrogs.

I love how determined he was. How resourceful. Somewhere in a birthday request I've made every year for over a decade, my son ended up learning four words of Mandarin because he wanted this particular quiet nugget of wildlife to keep existing in our lives.

Four bullfrogs came home. Two nights later, a yellow-crowned night heron came to see about them.

The minute I saw him, I was torn. I wanted to protect these frogs — not only for what they give back to the small ecosystem of our patio, but for everything they hold: twenty-two of them in 2009, my children young enough to still be catching tadpoles, one who lived to be nine inches long and outlasted everything else that year, silence during Covid, and now, this — three hung-up phone calls and a few words of borrowed Mandarin, so that I could have this chorus for my 69th birthday.

And I love herons too. For years I shooed themselves off the pond without a second thought. Then one year — 2023, I think — the creatures of the cool dark night started coming at midday, in the worst of the heat, standing in the water, gular fluttering, that fast open-mouthed panting birds do when they're desperate to cool down. From then on I tried to give them space in the heat of the day. But that day, I didn't.

So the poem that follows isn't really about the heron. It's about me, standing in my own garden, torn between two things I love, and having to admit that “protecting” one of them meant treating the other as a threat.

I wrote it in his voice because he needs to be heard. All summer I've been writing in the voice of the beings I love — the frog, the passion vine, the dragonfly, the prairie, and now the heron. It's how I advocate. It's how I try to spur collective action: not by telling you what I think a heron deserves, but by letting him tell you himself.

it is not beauty, exactly

the heron was my jiminy cricket-

and lessons turning 69.

The Pigeon Was Never the Point

I am renaming a ten-year-old project this month: The Peace Pigeon Project becomes Succession.

Nothing about the work itself is changing. The pieces stay exactly as they are — the bronze trumpeter, the cardboard-box pigeon, the toilet-paper-roll pigeon, the found sombrero I turned into wings and a body. What's changing is the frame around them, because the old frame was borrowed from someone else's symbolism, and it was never quite mine.

Here's the actual history. In fall 2016 I set myself a rule: one sculpture a week, a new material every time. I needed a subject stable enough to hold that discipline together, so I picked a bird — the German beak-crested trumpeter, a pigeon whose feathered feet let it balance without a pedestal. Later I learned this exact breed is the pigeon Picasso drew as his famous peace dove, a bird gifted to him by Matisse. In French and German, "pigeon" and "dove" are the same word. It's a good footnote. I kept the project named after it for ten years.

But "peace" was never the mechanism at work in that studio. What was actually happening, week after week, was disturbance and regrowth: I forced my hands through baling wire, then plaster, then root and branch, then copper tubing, then stone, and something different came out of me each time. I didn't have the vocabulary for that yet. I have it now, because the last several years of research into regenerative grazing gave it to me.

In grazing ecology, succession runs through the animal's whole body, not just the ground beneath it. A hoof breaks the soil crust; manure returns nitrogen and seeds a bloom of dung beetles and fly larvae; grazed grass regrows, shorter and denser. The flocks don’t wait for the new growth — they follow the bison directly, riding its back, working ticks and flies off its hide, then dropping to the dung pats for the insects breeding there. Cowbirds carried an older name for exactly this: buffalo birds, because the relationship was that specific, that physical. Not because the land made peace with them, but because a large grazing body is itself a habitat, and something disturbed it in a way that made more life possible. That is a more accurate description of 2016 than any dove ever was. I wasn't making peace with a pigeon. I was disrupting my own workflow on a weekly schedule and watching what came back.

There's a second thing the old title hid, and I want to name it. Every one of those birds is the same species, and no two look alike — cast in bronze, made of baling wire, built from a stranger's sombrero. That's not decoration. A population with more variation to draw on survives change better than one without it, whether that's a species or a whole landscape's worth of species, root depths, and insects. Diversity is what lets a system take a hit — drought, flood, heat — and come back afterward. My one bird wearing twenty different bodies makes that visible.

So: Succession. Same pieces, same materials, same bird in the title where it belongs now — as a footnote, not a frame.

I'm not scrubbing the old title from the record. If you search for The Peace Pigeon Project, you'll still find it, and I'll leave a note there pointing here. But going forward, this is what I call that year of work, and why.

See the full collection and artist statement →

Liberty

Diverse Works asked a question last night and had the generosity to let it go through an entire meal: what does liberty mean, alone and together, as the country turns 250. Not an icebreaker. The point of the dinner.

I have three early memories that surfaced first.

I was fourteen, in a science classroom, when the school nurse ran her finger down every girl's spine to confirm the strap beneath her dress. Girls were not allowed to wear pants. Liberty, that decade, was a body inventory.

I was four when a president inverted the question: not what is owed to you, but what you return to the whole that holds you. I didn't understand the syntax. I understood the reversal. It settled into me less than three years before an assassin's bullet made it permanent.

I was young when Texas Western won the national championship with an all-Black starting five, Don Haskins' answer to a question the sport hadn't agreed to ask yet. My dad took me to the airport to watch the team land. I think I felt the courage it took — theirs, and his — I just didn't know to name it yet.

Sixty years later the more I learn about how nature works, the more I ask it. Or it asks me.

We have inherited liberty as a story about separation — the individual freed from the collective, the body freed from surveillance, the nation freed from the crown. But separation is not what any living system optimizes for. A legume does not liberate nitrogen from soil. It fixes it, converts it, gives it back to ground that was starving for exactly that compound. Mycorrhizae do not free the tree from the forest floor. They bind root to fungus to root more precisely, so carbon and water move toward whoever is depleted. Nothing in a functioning system is freed from relationship. It is bound into one, more accurately, so the whole can keep metabolizing.

For some, liberty was never separation to defend — it was the nitrogen never fixed, the relation never permitted, arriving two centuries late and still arriving.

Symptoms are rarely where the story starts. They are usually its most recent sentence — a system telling us relationship has already been lost, and asking to be returned to it.

Liberty, seen this way, was never the absence of a hand on the back. It was always the right to enter relationship well — and the responsibility to keep it in balance once you're in it.

Two hundred fifty years in: what are you returning to the systems that made you free enough to ask the question?

Grateful to Diverse Works for asking it, and to every person at that table for how they held it.

UNFOLDING HOPE - the poem

The poem came first.

Before the panels, before the torn paper and watercolor and garden sprayer — there was the story of the cranes, and I needed to find the shape of it in words. What emerged was Unfolding Hope, written in four sections that map directly to the four panels of the quadriptych.

When I began writing the poem into the surface of the work in pastel, the words changed. They became part of the landscape — layered, recolored, some legible up close, some dissolving into marks from a distance. What you read here is the full text, the version that lives underneath the image.

The four sections move through the whole arc: from what was nearly lost, through the people who refused to accept that loss, to what it means to witness recovery, to what recovery asks of us now.

This is my fourth version of Unfolding Hope, the poem. In writing it I discovered I was not looking for my own voice — I was listening for the voice of the natural world. This poem belongs to the estuary, the grasslands.

Unfolding Hope is part of my solo show, made possible through the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program 2026. Presented in partnership with Weingarten Art Group.

Can Art Cool Thought?Reimagining the Data Center as Common Wealth

Seduction

I considered going barefoot at the opening of my art exhibition, 600 square feet of lawn covering the gallery. The pull of cool grass between my toes. Green. Uniform. Lush. Seduced, I almost took my shoes off. Then I remembered — what it takes to grow a monoculture that is visually perfect. The chemicals. The water. The living system erased so that one species could impersonate perfection. I kept my shoes on. I installed that sod as a social sculpture — to reshape society by exposing exactly what the lawn costs. I knew. And for a second it almost didn’t matter. Millions of Americans are seduced the same way. This essay is about data centers, bison, and what happens when you stop being seduced and start seeing in systems.

Vertigo

Sodding the entire gallery was initially about the lawn — the water it wastes, the emissions from gas equipment, the monoculture. The way it moves water across the surface instead of returning it to the ground. The same reasons I have been making social sculptures about the lawn since I started Symbiosis in 2020. In 2026 the water conversation is about data centers. The anger is immediate and loud. That anger made me curious. How does lawn water use actually compare to data center water use? Lawns: 2 trillion gallons a year. Data centers: 17.5 billion. The American dream — the lawn — uses 100 times more water than our newest industrial villain. These numbers. Vertigo. I needed time to think them through. I wrote my way back to solid ground, through undermine and On Sod.

And in writing I kept coming back to China Miéville’s novel The City and The City, that inspired our title, the circle & the circle. Two worlds occupying the same space, both conditioned to not see the other. We have been trained to see the lawn as desirable and technology as destructive. That conditioning is so deep, so woven into the American culture, that it is almost impossible to dodge. It seduced me at my own opening.That is how powerful our connection to lawn is. Both conditionings are wrong. And the cost is life. I had been asking myself how do we turn this around. And then I remembered what I do in my studio when a piece isn’t working. I turn it upside down. A new orientation reveals what you couldn’t see before. Then during the Wildlife is Technology talk, our moderator Weston asked the architect on the panel how she saw architecture functioning in landscape. I asked myself — what does it look like for a data center to mimic a bison. What if the data center, surrounded not by lawn or asphalt but by living ecosystem, can return everything it takes? That is when I saw it — data centers are wildlife. Consuming and returning. Borrowing instead of depleting. The bison building the ecosystem.

Before the vision, the math. Because without the math, the vision is just a dream.

Before the vision, the math. Because without the math, the vision is just a dream.

The Numbers

Pick any county with a data center. Newton County Georgia is spending $250 million on water infrastructure to keep up with one. Community water rates are up 33%. Tax revenue from Meta is $30 million a year — meaning the community spends 8 years of tax revenue just to break even on the water bill. These numbers are public record. Newton County serves as a model. The directional math holds — but site-specific results would vary based on soil composition, rainfall, and land condition.

The Fix

The Water

With 1,000 acres of living ecosystem, the data center’s daily draw of 500,000 gallons could be offset forty times over — 20 million gallons regenerated daily. The $250 million infrastructure bill disappears. The 33% rate hike disappears. The regional water table begins recovering.

Beyond the Property Line

But the water doesn’t stop at the property line. 20 million gallons a day would be a regional asset. Water in drought-prone regions is valued at over $1,000 per acre-foot. Neighboring municipalities with depleted aquifers. Agricultural communities fighting drought. A water banking system that stores surplus in wet seasons for dry ones. At 20 million gallons a day — roughly 22,000 acre-feet per year — the living landscape has a potential market value of $22 million per year. The data center would stop being a water consumer. It would become a water utility.

Not Just Water

Add waste heat recovery generating 5% of the facility’s power back as electricity. Add carbon sequestration generating carbon credits. Add a community that wants you there instead of fighting you in court.

Without: a $250 million liability, a depleted aquifer, and 70% of Americans opposed.

With: 20 million gallons regenerated daily, recovered electricity, carbon credits, and a community that needs what you are producing.

That is not idealism. That is a better business model.

The Longer It Runs

And these numbers are based on just 1% organic matter — the starting point. With regenerative grazing, soil organic matter builds from 1% to 15% in 15 years. Water infiltration goes from less than half an inch per hour to over ten inches per hour. The longer the system runs, the more water it holds. The data center campus improves with age.

Every other infrastructure investment depreciates. This one appreciates.

Built-In Accountability

And unlike a tax abatement or a community promise, the living landscape is not a commitment that can be restated in the next quarter. It is the infrastructure. The data center’s own water supply depends on the health of the living system surrounding it. You cannot remove the prairie without removing the water source. The living landscape is the accountability mechanism. It is structural, not regulatory. The data center cannot cheat it without destroying itself.

Seeing in Systems

I am a regenerative artist. A problem solver. I see connections others miss. I call it seeing in systems — the natural world’s way of connecting everything to everything so that life regenerates. Not sustains. Sustains is not enough. Regenerates. What follows is a vision, not a blueprint. The problems can be worked out as the details are drawn.

Data Centers Are Wildlife

The average data center campus is 224 acres of turf, parking, and perimeter fencing. The same lawn that seduced me at my own opening. I am imagining something different.

The Arrival

I imagine driving toward it. A winding road — no grid, no right angles, no fences. Landscape bridges wide enough that animals don’t know they are crossing a road — wide enough that a predator has no advantage, wide enough that the prairie feels continuous. Clusters of homes, each one different. Porches and swings facing outward. No garage doors swallowing the front. Cul-de-sacs designed for people who want to walk to work. Who live inside a nature preserve. Who grow their own food because they have time. Time the data center gives them back. Then rolling swells to slow the water. Wetlands deepening into ponds and protecting estuaries. Snowy egrets, roseate spoonbills, great blue herons, and sandhill cranes fill the terrain. The songs of birds reaching you before the building does. A woodland buffer — trees that break the sound and the heat, filter the light, cool the air between the living and the work. You arrive at a data center the way you arrive at a nature preserve. Because it is that first.

The Building

The building announces nothing. A metal structure built into the hill, its footprint small, its face disappearing into the slope. Below the ground line — a glass wall. You can see the roots growing down. Eight feet. Twelve feet. Fourteen feet. They are not avoiding the building. They are listening to it. Plant roots navigate by sound — drawn toward the vibration of water moving through pipes. The roots and the cooling system in conversation underground. The building is designed to hold that conversation without losing it.

Above — a living wall. Greenery billowing from every level, every terrace. On the roof — solar panels and living plants working together. The plants cool the panels. The panels power the building. The building has bones of recycled waste and skin of life. Packed between the metal structure and the earth — recycled plastic, discarded clothing, the waste the civilization that built this place did not know what to do with. It insulates. It silences.

You find a staircase going down into the ground. That is all. A door. The most powerful computing infrastructure on the planet, and it offers you a staircase and a door. Inside — rows of machines doing the work of the world in carefully controlled darkness. Through pipes in the walls — water. Not blue water drawn from the aquifer. Green water. Captured from the living roof above, condensed from the metal skin where warm server air meets cool hillside, returned through the closed loop that never lets it leave. Always circulating. Always returning. When it exits it moves through the land first. The prairie drinks. The roots absorb. What remains meanders toward the wetlands and the ponds. The aquifer recharges below. At the larger scale — the watershed, the atmosphere — moving the way water has always moved. Not always here. Not always when we need it. But that is not the water’s failure. That is ours. A century of lawns, asphalt, and industrial monocultures taught water to leave and never come back to the place it fell. This building will do the opposite.

The land is the monument. The building simply serves it. The people who tend it go in quickly, do what is needed, and return to the green.

The land is the monument. The building simply serves it.

The Land

Back in the light. Around the building a thick forest of green — another layer of cooling, another layer of silence. Then the land opens. Rolling prairie and ponds. A winding road. Wildlife doing what they have always done — eating plants, building soil, running the system that runs everything else.

Wild turkeys roosting in the trees. Vultures and hawks kettling in the sky. Small herds of native goats, sheep, deer, bison, and cows — grazing, dunging, building the soil the way they built the prairie for ten thousand years. Rabbits. Fox. Turtles moving between pond and prairie. Armadillos turning soil. Opossums grooming away ticks by the thousands. The whole system running itself.

And beavers. Keystone engineers — building dams, slowing water, recharging the aquifer. Areas with beavers retain nine times more water during drought. The pond does not need managing. It manages itself.

The hum of computers gives way to the hum of hummingbirds. Songbirds everywhere.

Pollinators working the prairie — bees, butterflies, moths — carrying the future from flower to flower.

People kayaking through the wetlands. Meditating. Fishing. Jogging. Gardening. Tending the food forest. Checking on the wildlife. Living at the pace of the land.

These people have time for this. Not despite the data center. Because of it. The AI in the building underground gave it back to them.

The machines think so the people can be present.

The machines think so the people can be present.

Common Wealth

The land gives. The data center gives. The community gives. They trade water for power. The trade is richer than that. The community gets free electricity, restored land, public access, public food gardens, a pond, wetlands that buffer their homes from floods, cooler air, hummingbirds back in their gardens. The data center gets water, land, and a community of people who tend the system because their lives depend on it. Not their livelihoods. Their lives. People need to tend land the way they need to breathe. Connection to the living world is not an amenity. It is survival. This is not a corporate deal. This is common wealth.

This is not a corporate deal. This is common wealth.

Location

Location matters. The places where water is most scarce and heat most punishing need this first. This is not a solution for the few. In cold climates the ambient temperature does the cooling work. The insulation of recycled waste keeps the building warm. No extra energy needed. With the right design every community should want one. Not tolerate one. Want one. A data center that turns 1,000 acres of lawn and asphalt into a living ecosystem. Carbon sequestered. Water returned. Life restored. That is not an industrial imposition. That is common wealth arriving in your community.

The Math

Art brings big problems down to human scale — the scale where we stop feeling helpless and start feeling responsible. I started where I was, in an art gallery. How much water could 600 square feet of sod hold by adding just 1% more organic matter — the living and the decaying, roots and microbes and decomposed leaves and bison dung — the dark layered material that builds from the top down and holds water like a sponge? 600 square feet is about 1/72nd of an acre. 20,000 gallons divided by 72 equals roughly 277 gallons. Three days of water for one person. From dead monoculture. One percent. Then I jumped from the gallery to the data center. How many acres would a data center need to regenerate its daily draw of 500,000 gallons? Twenty five acres. The daily water supply of 1,400 people. This is not a direct exchange. The 25 acres does not replace what the data center uses today. Like the bison whose dung does not replace the grass it ate — it starts the process. The microbes build the soil. The soil holds the water. The aquifer slowly refills. Not replacement. Regeneration.

The Bison

The bison at Roam Ranch in the Texas Hill Country showed me the way. Technology is a human creation. Humans are part of nature. Technology can fit into natural systems with knowledge and intent. The bison does not waste. It tramples and eats the grass. It generates heat. It produces dung. The dung delivers microbes that break down the trampled grass. The decay builds the soil. The soil grows more grass. Nothing is lost. Everything cycles. Heat and water are energy. I asked AI — why are we cooling the heat the data center generates? In seconds I learned that researchers at Rice University are already developing systems that combine data center waste heat with rooftop solar to generate clean electricity — recovering up to 80% more electricity from the same waste heat. Stockholm has integrated over 20 data centers into its municipal heating network, warming 30,000 apartments. During the Paris Olympics, the Equinix data center heated the Olympic Aquatic Centre — and transferred that heat free of charge for 15 years. The heat was never waste. Regenerative farmers know this. Regenerative ranchers know this. Now the data center can know it too.

The Cost

The knowledge exists. The technology exists. The math works. So what is stopping it?

The risk of leading change. The cost of being wrong. The cost of sticking out. The cost of trying and failing. Our social and political systems are designed to protect existing beliefs. Changing your mind in public is dangerous. The lawn is beautiful. The data center is dangerous. Those conditionings hold at every dinner party because breaking them costs something real — fitting in. It makes you seem argumentative. It happened to me last night.

AI has no ego invested in being right. Does not need to be reelected or get invited to the neighborhood coffee. It responds to new information the way a living system responds to rain. Immediately. Without embarrassment. Without political cost. In that way AI is more like a living system than our society is.

The remedy grows where the wound is. The same 40 million acres causing the problem may be the solution to it. Data centers are wildlife.

Not a drain. A gift. Of water. Of time. Of life.

Can art cool thought? It cooled mine.

underMINE

The American Lawn, AI, and What We Have Been Conditioned to Unsee

The American lawn.

40 million acres. 2 trillion gallons of water a year. The largest irrigated crop in the country — more than corn, wheat, and fruit trees combined.

Is that a lot? What is a lot? The press tells us U.S. AI data centers consume too much — roughly 17.5 billion gallons of water in 2023.

Here is the truth.

The lawn uses 100 times more water than AI.

Lawns at 2 trillion are good and AI at 17.5 billion is bad? Where is the logic? And water is just half of it. We mow it on Saturdays — burning 800 million gallons of gas a year. Americans spill 17 million gallons just refueling their equipment — more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez.

In 2021 I carved the carbon symbol into 35 feet of Zoysia turfgrass at Lawndale Art Center — Carbon by the Yard — to make visible what those 800 million gallons deprive us of. In 2022 I replaced a section of that same turf with native plants, living soil, and deep roots — CARBONsink — to show what the same ground could store instead. Carbon. Water. Life.

That is how I know how ridiculously easy it is to change.

The lawn is not the problem. What we have made it into is the problem. Forty million acres of chemically dependent monoculture sitting on top of some of the most populated land in the country. Land that could be absorbing rainwater, cooling the air, sequestering carbon, feeding pollinators, restoring the biodiversity we have been losing for a century.

For every one percent increase in organic matter per acre, soil can hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water. Native plant roots reach eight to fourteen feet deep — sequestering carbon like an upside down rainforest. The coastal prairie that Houston sits on once soaked up everything the sky sent down. We replaced it with turf. Harvey showed us what that costs.

But the ecological argument, as urgent as it is, is not the most powerful thing the lawn could do.

The most powerful thing is this: lawns exist in the largest population centers in the world. They are the daily interface between modern humanity and the living world. If we change what happens on that interface — in front yards, street medians, corporate campuses, school grounds — we change how millions of people understand their relationship to the planet. That is a social transformation. The ripple effects are incalculable.

Which brings me back to AI.

The comparison between lawn water use and AI water use is not meant to let either one off the hook. It is meant to show that we are already wasting at a scale that dwarfs what we are alarmed about — and that the solution to both problems might be the same solution. AI saves us time. It makes us better. What if it also helps us see what we have been conditioned not to see?

What if the lawn became part of the answer to AI’s water problem? Native landscapes absorb and store water in the ground. Deep roots recharge aquifers. Living soil filters and holds what falls from the sky. More than 160 new AI data centers have been built across the U.S. in the past three years — many of them in water-scarce regions. A Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia uses 500,000 gallons a day — 10% of the entire county’s water supply.

What if the landscapes surrounding those data centers were living systems instead of turf? What if regenerative landscaping — on the scale of cities — could recharge the aquifers that AI is draining?

I don’t know if that is possible. But I know that the first step is to stop treating the lawn as decoration and start treating it as a living system connected to everything.

Writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer observed that in the wild, the solution is often found near the problem. The remedy grows where the wound is. The lawn uses 100 times more water than AI — and the lawn is also the solution to AI’s water crisis. The same 40 million acres. The same ground. The problem and the answer occupying the same space.

Tomorrow the gallery floor disappears under 600 square feet of sod.

I thought about attending the opening barefoot. Then I thought about the chemicals that must have been applied to grow this perfect mono-crop of sod. I won’t be barefoot on it.

That is the point. We have made the most abundant surface on the planet — 40 million acres of it — something you cannot safely stand on in your bare feet. Something that poisons the people who maintain it. Something that sheds the rain, kills the insects, and heats the ground it covers.

And we call it a lawn. We call it beautiful. We mow it on Saturdays.

underMINE is 600 square feet of that lawn, brought inside. What we have been conditioned to unsee — you walk by it every day — now you are standing on it.

Now imagine it differently.

AI changes instantly when it receives better information. Society takes forever — even when the difference is 100 times more gallons of water. However for society, baby steps are how it starts. One gallery floor. One front yard. One school ground. One corporate campus.

What if AI saves us enough time that we have time to garden? To grow our own food? To tend the land instead of manage it against itself? Think of the ripple effects of that idea.

The lawn has enormous potential.

The first step is to stop underMINEing. Start seeing.

Nantucket’s GMO Mice on 60 Minutes: The Sexiest Fix Is Usually the Wrong One

A tick. A mouse. A gene. What could go wrong?

I WATCHED AND THOUGHT PLEASE ASK THE QUESTION

I watched 60 Minutes this Sunday. They were on Nantucket Island, where scientists are genetically modifying white-footed mice to be resistant to the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The idea is that if the mice can't carry the pathogen, the ticks that feed on them can't spread it to humans.

I have four grandchildren. We spend a lot of time outside. Lyme disease is no longer someone else's problem.

On the surface, it sounds like the most reasonable thing in the world. Lyme disease is brutal. It is under-diagnosed, under-treated, and life-altering for the people who get it and can't get rid of it. I understand why this research exists. I understand the urgency. And I understand the seduction of the technological fix. Technology is the sexy fix.

But I kept sitting with the question that nobody on the broadcast asked.

Are we walking in with a solution before we've finished asking the question?

What does the system already know?

I wondered how they got there. I did a bit of research.

The whole crisis on that island traces back to a single decision in 1926, when the community voted to bring two female deer to the island to keep a lone buck company. The deer population grew. The ticks that feed on deer grew with it. The rest followed. One small, well-intentioned act rippled into a century of consequences.

There is another layer to this. People on Nantucket were already calling it the Nantucket flu long before scientists had a name for it. The island was ground zero before anyone understood what was spreading. The bacterium has been here for sixty thousand years. What changed was the balance.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Here is what I have learned — not in a laboratory, but in gardens, in living sculptures I have spent years building and tending and learning from: nature is not a problem to be solved. It is a relationship to be understood. And when we skip the understanding and go straight to the intervention, the intervention tends to produce consequences that take years — sometimes decades — to fully reveal themselves.

We have a word for it now. Unintended consequences. It has become so common a phrase we stopped hearing it.

It is time to hear it again.

PULLING THE THREAD

When you release a genetically modified organism into a wild ecosystem, you are not making one change. You are pulling a single thread in a fabric whose full complexity you cannot see — because no one can. The relationships between species in a functioning ecosystem are not linear. They are not predictable in the way a software update is predictable. They branch and loop and feed back on themselves across seasons and generations and multiple layers of soil.

The white-footed mouse is not just a Lyme vector. It is food. It is seed disperser. It is prey for foxes, owls, hawks, and snakes. It is a piece of an intricate puzzle that the island's food web has been assembling for centuries. When you genetically alter a species and release it into that web, you are not just changing what that species does to a tick. You are changing what that species does to everything it touches — and everything those things touch in turn.

We do not know what that is yet. We genuinely do not know.

That uncertainty alone should slow us down.

The scientists on Nantucket are brilliant at what they do. They just aren't reading Grandin. They aren't reading Carson. Different silo. The genome cares.

I LEARNED FROM TEMPLE GRANDIN

The clearest warning comes not from an environmentalist but from Temple Grandin.

She points to a Russian experiment that began in the 1950s. A geneticist named Belyaev set out to breed foxes for a single trait — tameness. Within a few generations the foxes were calmer. But simultaneously, without anyone selecting for them, other changes appeared: floppy ears, curled tails, white facial blazes, spotted coats. Nobody chose those traits. They came along for the ride. The genome, it turns out, does not honor our categories. Change one thing and the effects are linked to things you cannot predict.

Then there is what happened to the chickens. The broiler industry selected hard for large breast muscles and fast growth. Before the 1990s, what followed had never been seen. Roosters began attacking hens — violently, injuring and killing them. The normal courtship behavior had simply vanished somewhere in the selection process, and something dangerous had taken its place. It spread from one strain to nearly all strains within just a few years. Nobody planned it. Grandin writes that nobody knows exactly why it happened. Commercial broad-breasted turkeys were pushed so far in the same direction that they can no longer breed naturally at commercial scale. The entire industrial turkey industry now depends on artificial insemination. One trait selected. An entire behavior system dismantled.

RACHEL CARSON WARNED US

Ask any Texan over fifty where the horned toads went. My brother and I used to find them in the desert. They were so gentle they would sit still in your hands. Then fire ants arrived — stowaways in the soil used as ships' ballast, introduced through the Port of Mobile in the 1930s. At first they were a manageable problem. Native ant species were already fighting a low intensity war against them. The system was handling it. Then the chemical industry and the USDA decided to make fire ant eradication a program. They aerially sprayed DDT and other pesticides across the South — killing not just fire ants but the native ant species that had been competing with them. Rachel Carson wrote about it in Silent Spring. The pesticides didn't eradicate the fire ants. They toughened them. With their natural competitors eliminated, fire ants flourished and spread to more states than ever. The USDA quietly ended the program in the early 1970s, admitting the ant mounds were not a serious obstacle to farming after all. The intervention created the crisis it claimed to be solving.

Carson went further. The fire ant program was not born from evidence of actual damage. It was born from manufactured hysteria — and a pesticide industry that needed a market. The fire ant became the villain because someone needed to sell the cure.

Fire ants outcompeted and displaced the native harvester ants that horned lizards depend on for food. The horned lizard population collapsed across the state within decades. Nobody released fire ants to kill horned toads. The effects rippled through the food web in a direction no one predicted, erasing a creature that had been part of this landscape for centuries.

A staple of my childhood. Gone.

SEEING IN SYSTEMS

What I keep thinking about, watching the Nantucket story, is this: before the genetic modification, did anyone seriously study what is out of balance? Could the answer be as simple as returning a predator? Foxes eat mice. Owls eat mice.

The science backs this up in ways that should stop the experiment cold and give us all hope and faith in the natural world. Ironically, 60 Minutes already told this story. In 2020 they covered the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. When wolves returned in 1995, coyote populations dropped by half — by as much as 80 percent in areas with established wolf packs. Fox populations recovered. The cascade moved through the entire ecosystem in ways still being studied thirty years later. One predator returned. The system began remembering.

That same chain applies to Nantucket. Researchers studying the spread of Lyme disease across the Northeast found that increases over the past three decades are frequently uncorrelated with deer abundance — and instead coincide with the decline of the red fox, pushed out of its territory by the expansion of coyotes. Where coyotes dominate, foxes disappear. Where foxes disappear, mice multiply. Where mice multiply, infected ticks follow. The Cary Institute's Richard Ostfeld puts it plainly: certain predators protect our health. Manage the environment so healthy predator populations can exist, and Lyme disease rates fall.

Nobody needed a genetics lab for that insight. The system lives it.

Digging deeper — Opossums. Nearly two decades of field research finds they are one of the most effective natural checks on tick populations — not because anyone designed them for it, but because of how they live. They groom obsessively, killing ticks that land on them. And because ticks are drawn to opossums the way they are drawn to mice, the ticks that choose an opossum instead of a mouse never acquire the Lyme bacteria — they die on the wrong host. Opossum populations have been declining across the Northeast as habitat shrinks and road mortality rises. Now that is a lead story!

Hawks, owls, kestrels. The predators that keep mouse populations in check — reducing the host population through biology rather than modification. The question is not whether they could help. The question is whether we have given them the habitat they need to do it.

None of these approaches require us to change the genome of a wild animal and release it into a living system we cannot fully predict.

White-footed mice don't just carry Lyme disease. They live underground — in burrows dug by other animals, in root cavities, in the hollow spaces the island's soil has accumulated over centuries. When they vacate those spaces, other species move in — including native bumblebees that depend on these same underground spaces to nest and reproduce. What happens when the DNA left behind in those burrows belongs to a genetically modified animal? Nobody has studied it. We have to ask.

In my work, I have learned to sit still long enough for the living world to forget I am there. It is what I mean when I write about seeing in systems — the discipline of looking before intervening. What I see when I do that is not disorder. It is a conversation already underway. Relationships I didn't design, couldn't have predicted, and would have disrupted if I had reached in too fast.

The white-footed mouse has been in relationship with that island's food web for a very long time. The tick with the mouse. The Lyme bacteria with the tick. Something changed — in the landscape, in the predator population, in the human encroachment on the habitat — that allowed the disease to expand. The system is showing us where the imbalance is.

Genetically modifying the mouse answers a symptom. Restoring the system addresses the cause.

THE SAFER PATH

A tick. A mouse. A gene. What could go wrong? Everything.

That science is cool. It is sexy. It has to wait. There is no going back once you have rewritten a genome and released it into the wild. The safer path is simpler and older — give nature what it needs to find its own balance. Remove whatever is preventing the predators from returning. Restore what the island once knew.

Not sexy. But beautiful in a way sexy will never be.

The system remembers. We just have to get out of its way.

On Sod: the poverty of the manicured world.

image by feast day studios

on underMINE

Walter de Maria brought 280,000 pounds of earth into a SoHo loft in 1977. He called it a minimal horizontal interior earth sculpture and refused to say more. The richness of The New York Earth Room has always lived in that refusal — in the gap between what the white cube insists you should be experiencing and what 280,000 pounds of soil actually is. De Maria imported wildness. Something alien. Something the gallery had no language for.

I imported the familiar.

underMINE

600 square feet of sod

Six hundred square feet of sod. The thing you drive past every day without a second thought. The lawn.

That distinction matters. The Earth Room defamiliarized by bringing nature’s strangeness inside. underMINE brings nature’s domestication — the most managed, most normalized, most ideologically loaded surface in America — and asks people to look at it knowing what it costs. What it doesn’t do. The poverty of the manicured world. Estrangement is easy when the object is foreign. Doing it with the mundane takes something closer to surgery.

The numbers in the essay aren’t decoration. They’re a specific kind of vertigo. Forty million acres. Two trillion gallons of water a year. Seventeen million gallons spilled just refueling mowers — more than the Exxon Valdez. AI data centers consumed 17.5 billion gallons in 2023. The lawn uses one hundred times that. We are alarmed by AI. We mow on Saturdays. The numbers name the mechanism by which the object became invisible.

I borrowed the conceptual frame from China Miéville. In The City & The City, two cities occupy the same physical space. Through conditioning, citizens are trained to unsee one of them. The lawn is the same. The living system it replaced occupies the same ground. We have been trained to see one and not the other. The conditioning has a name. It is the American dream. And in the American dream the numbers don’t compute.

Agnes Denes is the more honest comparison — she planted wheat on Manhattan landfill in 1982 and refused to let the symbolic weight be vague. Land value. Hunger. Displacement. Denes had numbers too. Denes wanted you to feel the gap between what the land was doing and what it could do.

But my ground is Houston. That matters. De Maria worked in SoHo. Denes worked on a Manhattan landfill downtown. I work on the coastal prairie that Harvey exposed as a system that had forgotten how to absorb water. The lawn I’m indicting is the lawn that shed Harvey’s rain. I’ve never stood in the Earth Room. I’ve never walked Denes’s wheatfield. I found them the way most people find things now — on a screen. That matters less than I once thought. Houston is where I learned to see it. But the numbers are not Houston’s numbers. They are every city’s. Every suburb’s. Every corporate campus’s. The work isn’t mine alone. Returning managed land to living system — native plants, living soil, deep roots — is the American dream we have been conditioned not to see.

I thought about attending the opening barefoot. Then I thought about the chemicals required to grow that perfect monoculture. I won’t.

The most abundant surface on the planet — forty million acres of it. Something you cannot safely stand on without shoes. Something that poisons the people who maintain it.

The American dream.

One gallery floor. One front yard. One school ground. One corporate campus. Not grandiose. Sequential.

De Maria’s Earth Room has sat in that SoHo loft since 1977. Time, his caretaker says, is what grows there. My sod comes out when the show closes. It is not meant to accumulate time. It is meant to interrupt it.

My marks, called into form.

Unfolding Hope will be installed @houstonendowment next week. This week was my last week with the work. Art can have multiple meanings, and so I guess it inspires multiple poems. my marks called into form.

How I Got Here

In the mid-nineties, my husband was diagnosed with diabetes. We had both grown up in small towns, but differently. My mother was a schoolteacher — we ate whole foods, but they came from cans. My husband grew up closer to the source: farms, soil, food that still remembered where it came from. When the doctors handed us the food pyramid and told us to follow it, we were starting from different places. But we arrived at the same question together. The grains at the base, the carbohydrates they called foundation — the more we followed their guidance, the more insulin he needed. The glucose numbers didn’t lie. And slowly, reluctantly, we understood that the people giving us this advice weren’t confused. The pharmaceutical companies, the medical institutions, the government agencies propping up industrial grain and monoculture and seed patents — they knew. It was a hard thing to accept. But the numbers made it undeniable. So we stopped following and started looking for ourselves.

The questions led to farmers markets, to conversations with people who were still raising food the old way. A regenerative farmer selling grass-fed beef at a market stand told me something I didn’t expect: that grass-fed beef carries the same beneficial omega fats as wild-caught salmon. I had been eating salmon every week for years — it was what the doctors recommended, the one healthy protein we were told to trust. But it had started to feel wrong to me. How could the only truly healthy protein come from cold water fish? How would humans have survived inland, far from any ocean, for thousands of years? That question had haunted me without an answer. The farmer gave me one. The land the animal lived on was in the food. The health of the soil was in the body. Suddenly everything shifted. And there was something else: if grass-fed land proteins could replace our dependence on wild-caught fish, the pressure on the ocean lifts too. Fix agriculture on the table and you begin to fix it in the water. The systems are not separate. They never were.

That connection — between the land and what it produces and what it does inside us — changed the way I see everything. It wasn’t just about food. It was about a system. A living system that industrial civilization had interrupted, and that we were all paying for without knowing it. I wasn’t angry so much as awake. Once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

A few years later I came across Allan Savory’s TED talk on desertification and the role of ruminants in restoring degraded land. Savory showed how the movement of grazing animals — their consumption, their waste, their hooves breaking the crust of dry earth — was the mechanism that had built the world’s grasslands over millennia. But it wasn’t just the land they were building. Their waste alone feeds an entire chain of life: microbes, flies, dung beetles, birds, and everything up from there. Remove the animals and the whole web unravels. Return them, managed holistically, and the prairie comes back — not just the grass, but every creature that depends on it. Carbon returns to the soil. Water returns to the ground. The climate steadies.

I had been following a thread from my husband’s body to a farmer’s pasture to the roots of the coastal prairie, and I didn’t fully know it until that moment. Humans are animals. We are part of this system. We dispersed seeds and moved nutrients long before we decided we were separate from the land and above it. We are not managers of nature. We are participants in it — or we are supposed to be.

This understanding became the ground my art grows from. It led first to Endangered Knowledge: the Soul of Humus — a work about what we have forgotten and what the soil still holds. And from there, inevitably, to Symbiosis — where curiosity installed the first microbial soil, planted the first native plants, and became something you could walk through.

Unfolding Hope- Why This Work

When Houston Endowment put out the call, the question they were asking artists was simple: what is hope to you?

I didn’t have to think long. I have hope every single day — it lives in the garden, in the returning birds, in every plant that pushes through cracked pavement. Hope is not something I go looking for. It finds me in my work.

But when asked to define it, to make it into something others can stand in front of and feel — my answer came from the coastal prairie. From the cranes. From the specific, documented, undeniable fact that twelve bird couples became hundreds of thousands because people decided they were worth saving. Their act inspired by art.

Richard Louv’s words run through everything I make: we cannot protect what we don’t love, can’t love what we don’t know, can’t know what we don’t see. Most people living in cities have lost their daily connection to wildlife. That gap — between humans and the natural world — is not just a personal loss. It is a conservation crisis. You cannot mobilize people to protect something they have never truly seen.

I first encountered the crane story through Aldo Leopold’s Marshland Elegy. If you haven’t read it, stop and do that. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever encountered — the kind that gets inside you and doesn’t leave. Leopold heard the sandhill cranes at dawn in the marsh and understood, in that moment, that he was hearing something ancient and irreplaceable.

Beauty is not passive. It is a delivery system for obligation. Leopold understood that. His words were so elegant they transferred the weight directly to the reader. People felt the responsibility, claimed it, and unfolded it into action.

That essay is part of what saved the cranes.

That is the power of art. Not decoration. Not commentary. A force that moves people from passive knowing to something that changes behavior. I am not comparing myself to Leopold — but I am absolutely working in that tradition. The hope is that these four panels, the poem layered into them, the story of twelve bird couples becoming hundreds of thousands — might move someone the way his words moved me.

Unfolding Hope is my answer to that question.

The piece is a quadriptych — four panels, approximately 28 feet wide by 9 feet tall — depicting early morning scenes in a coastal prairie estuary. Poetry narrating the crane recovery is written directly into the surface in pastel, flowing quietly across the landscape. Some words are readable up close. From a distance they dissolve into marks.

The four panels move through the whole story: Quiet Estuary, Life’s Stubborn March, Courtship Dance, Knowledge Is The Bridge. Together they carry the viewer from what was nearly lost, through the people who refused to accept that loss, to what recovery actually looks like — and what it asks of us now.

This is not a mourning piece. It is a proof of concept.

The cranes came back. The coastal prairie can too. And so, possibly, can we.

Unfolding Hope is part of my solo show, made possible through the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program 2026. Presented in partnership with Weingarten Art Group. More at cindeeklement.com and @cindeeklementart.

Unfolding Hope — This Piece and How It's Made

I finished Unfolding Hope last week. These photographs were made about a month ago, when I was still deep in it — crouched on the floor of the gallery, a garden sprayer in one hand and a cup of pigment in the other, watching watercolor run down nine feet of layered paper. That moment still captures the process well: I set things in motion and then pay close attention to where they go.

The Piece

Unfolding Hope is a site-specific quadriptych on paper — approximately 28 feet wide by 9 feet tall — and the piece for my solo show for the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program 2026. The four panels are: Quiet Estuary, Life's Stubborn March, Courtship Dance, and Knowledge Is The Bridge. Together they move through the story of the sandhill crane — near-extinction in the early 1900s, recovery through the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and restored wetlands, and what that recovery means for how we live now.

My poem, also called Unfolding Hope, is written directly onto the surface in pastel—layered over itself in multiple colors —so the words almost dissolve into the landscape. Some phrases are readable up close. From a distance, they just look like marks. That's intentional. The seed phrases scattered across all four panels include:

 My Process

This is a process I developed in 2025. I start with research — studying the birds, pinning photographs to the wall, making detailed color swatches, doing pencil drawings on Stonehenge paper until I really know the forms. That research matters to me as much as the painting does. I can't draw what I haven't truly looked at.

The reference photographs pinned to my wall are mostly my mother’s — Minnie Travis, who is 95 years old and still out there shooting and sending images through Dropbox. I can’t make this up. Some are mine, but honestly, hers are much much better.

The drawings

Great Blue Heron- Detail of drawing on the fourth panel Knowledge is the bridge.

Then I tear the drawings apart. Not cut — tear. I collage the torn pieces onto a fresh sheet of the same paper, which creates a layered relief. The torn edges bring energy to the composition and help the birds blend into the environment rather than sitting on top of it.

After that, the color. Big washes of watercolor and ink, then the garden sprayer to push wet paint into all the ridges and cracks in the relief. The surface ends up looking almost geological — cracked and stratified, with color pooled in the low spots. I go back in with pastels for line work and detail, spray again, repeat until it feels right.

The finished panels are three to four sheets thick. They're surprisingly durable.

Sandhill Crane detail

Why This Bird

The sandhill crane population was down to 24 birds in parts of their range in the early 1900s. They came back — through the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, through habitat protection, through people deciding they were worth saving. That's the story I keep coming back to. Not because it's a feel-good ending, but because it actually happened. Aldo Leopold heard that prehistoric call at dawn and wrote about it as the sound of evolutionary time — deep, ancient, irreplaceable. I feel that way about the coastal prairie.

Richard Louv's line runs through all my work: we cannot protect what we don't love, can't love what we don't know, can't know what we don't see. This piece is built around that. The birds are specific, the habitat is specific, the history is specific. The more particular it is, the more it matters.

These Images

These shots were taken by Rony Canales (@ronyedin) about a month ago — I'm grateful to him and to Houston Endowment and Weingarten Art Group for their support of this work. The mural takes up the whole gallery wall.

— — —

Unfolding Hope is part of my solo show, made possible through the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program 2026.

Photography by Rony Canales (@ronyedin).

Presented in partnership with Weingarten Art Group (@weingartenartgroup).

More at www.cindeeklement.com and @cindeeklementart.